Obama’s Syria strategy

President Barack Obama is staking his Syria strategy — and maybe more — on an unlikely ally: Congress.

Facing public ambivalence and a possible revolt on Capitol Hill over his plans to launch military strikes against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime, Obama said Saturday that while he doesn’t have to, he will seek a formal use-of-force authorization from a Congress that has been uncooperative on nearly all fronts for the past three years.

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The decision to go to Capitol Hill reflects the leanings of a Candidate Obama who campaigned in 2008 on multilateralism and restraint in the use of presidential power. A successful vote in Congress would strengthen Obama’s hand with both allies and enemies, senior administration officials said Saturday.

The flip side: a losing vote could weaken the president ahead of debates on key domestic issues including the budget, debt ceiling, Obamacare funding and immigration. On the international stage, it could embolden Syria, Iran and other unfriendly countries.

At the very least, Obama clearly wants lawmakers to co-own a decision that he can’t back away from after having declared last year that Assad would cross a “red line” if he used chemical weapons against his own people.

But he was planning to go it alone after hearing from his National Security Council last weekend. He only reversed course on Friday night — after America’s closest ally, Britain, chose to stay out of Syria, and nearly 200 lawmakers urged him to seek authorization. That brought to a halt a full week’s worth of administration officials laying out war plans.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, advised Obama that the timing of strikes doesn’t matter from a military point of view. But the delay sets up a high-stakes political moment.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) — who received a classified briefing in the White House Situation Room on Thursday and is convinced Assad used chemical weapons — said if a vote were held today, it would fail.

“If all this is about because President Obama drew a red line and he’s concerned about his credibility and restoring his credibility, that’s not enough justification for me,” Johnson said.

To some of his critics, it looks like Obama wants Congress to stop him. Even if Saturday’s surprise move is in line with Obama’s personal feelings, it smacks of a base and poor political calculation, they say. By not demanding Congress return from its vacation early, it gives Assad a window to repeat a chemical weapons attack should he so choose.

“It’s like watching a bad episode of ‘The West Wing.’ You cannot be president and go back and forth like this and try to communicate strength and confidence to your enemies and your allies,” said one veteran Democratic strategist. “It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what presidential power is. It’s clear that he doesn’t want to do this. Now they’re trying to find any way possible to get away from that outcome.”

Obama’s Saturday challenge to Congress had the familiar ring of his exhortations to pass his forgotten jobs bill, the defeated gun control reforms and countless other White House efforts that died at the Capitol. Obama is asking the same Congress that failed to pass a farm bill and dithered well past the expiration deadline on student loan rates to authorize firing missiles into a country already wracked with civil war.

And this time Obama’s White House must also navigate opposing coalitions from his own party. In the past, lawmakers have expressed regret over signing onto open-ended use-of-force authorizations that ended up giving President George W. Bush more authority than they had intended.

Obama plans to send a use-of-force authorization measure to Congress soon, but senior administration officials declined on Saturday to detail whether it would have a specific end date or any other conditions on the use of the president’s power.